6 ms·

I know these problems are serious, but I feel there is a fun and reassuring aspect to them. Back in the 90s and early 2000s we thought anything can be hacked by

by tinco 7y ago

I know these problems are serious, but I feel there is a fun and reassuring aspect to them. Back in the 90s and early 2000s we thought anything can be hacked by any clever person. Then the 2010s happened and almost all software, even Windows, became near unassailable fortresses, especially systems like iOS with their tight control of the OS. Sure, a 0day drops every now and then, but we all know that it's basically impossible to attack a modern well configured system. These hardware bugs turn that idea on its head, suddenly the whole ghost in the shell hacker style dream is again a possibility. A motivated person or group of persons might go and hack any system out there. And that's really a bit reassuring, it's a little bit scary to think about how our lives might be ruled by these systems that are unassailable. I'd like to at least stand a chance when technology turns on us.

d2mw 7y ago
> we all know that it's basically impossible to attack a modern well configured system Where in the world did this fantastic idea come from? https://events.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Syzbot-and-the-Tale-of-Thousand-Kernel-Bugs-Dmitry-Vyukov-Google.pdf https://events.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/1... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwn2Own#Summary_of_successful_exploits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwn2Own#Summary_of_successful_... https://threatpost.com/baseband-zero-day-exposes-millions-of-mobile-phones-to-attack/124833/ https://threatpost.com/baseband-zero-day-exposes-millions-of...
- tinco 7y ago
  How many of those kernel bugs translate to meaningful RCE's in generally available stable software? Maybe I'm out of the loop, but as that presentation says nowadays a big 0day will have a logo and national headlines, that also underlines how rare they are. To me the history of Pwn2Own exactly shows the trend I'm talking about. Going from very successful editions to increasingly less successful editions as the years go by to the point where the competition barely even exists anymore. And then that baseband firmware exploit, that's the dream. You could hack any device with that almost regardless of what software runs on top. I put that in the same class as the Intel chip vulnerabilities.
  - staticassertion 7y ago
    Well the first Chrome RCE attack leveraged a Windows kernel exploit, so that seems like a reasonable one to point to.
  - d2mw 7y ago
    Pwn2Own fell out of the spotlight over time because they managed to piss off sponsors and teams alike, not because any material improvement occurred in software security, involving systems that for the most part continue to be millions of lines of C just like they were in the 90s. Security processes have improved tremendously in recent times, but software security in general has advanced only incrementally at best, such that individuals can still succeed at breaking the majority of software, and are able to do so with such reliability that the practice is done as a sporting event. Per the slides over 150 of those kernel bugs resulted in code execution, and that is already a lowball count of the true number. Upstream Linux, being possibly the most visible and well-resourced OS codebase around, even by 2019 does not have the tools necessary just to automatically find the bugs we already know exist.
    - BuildTheRobots 7y ago
      > Pwn2Own fell out of the spotlight over time because they managed to piss off sponsors and teams alike I don't suppose there's any more information - it sounds like an interesting tale.
userbinator 7y ago
Keep in mind that all these speculative execution exploits rely on being able to already execute code on the target, they can only read data somewhat slowly, and where the data you want to read is in a 64-bit address space is not easy to find. The media loves to blow things out of proportion, but all the specexec attacks are really not as big a deal as e.g. remote code execution. In some ways, they are the real-world equivalent of "you can sometimes hear things your neighbours say, with a sensitive microphone and lots of patience."
- tedunangst 7y ago
  How lucky then that we all live in the cloud now and running code on other people's computers is the only place anybody runs code anymore.
  - tinco 7y ago
    In addition to that all sorts of vendors run their code on our systems to provide us with their features. And then there's the idea that some of these bugs have been demonstrated to be exploitable from within a JavaScript VM!
  - menzoic 7y ago
    There's a lot more attention to this threat than there would be if the cloud wasn't ubiquitous. Could be a net positive.
- cjbprime 7y ago
  This is somewhere between misleading and wrong -- Spectre-ish attacks can be conducted by JavaScript when you visit a random web page. It's mostly appropriately-proportioned.
  - inetknght 7y ago
    What is JavaScript except code being remotely executed?
    - 7y ago
badrabbit 7y ago
It's more like in the 90s and 2000s software-exploit based attacks were fairly easy. These days you have to adopt and use logical,social and configuration vulnerabilities that have always been common as well.
- tinco 7y ago
  Imagine the damage those ransomware people could have done back then.. Whole countries were open for disruption.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Given that Morris Worm is 30 years old and we keep using UNIX derived OSes, those ransomware people have plenty of opportunities still.
    - smhenderson 7y ago
      But surely there are a much smaller number of Unix computers running sendmail these days? And sendmail is a lot more secure now than it was 30 years ago. Doesn't seem like a fair comparison IMHO...
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        Enjoy the Google talks from Linux Kernel Summit 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfNt6MsLj0E&list=PLbzoR-pLrL6rOT6m50HdJFYUHyvA9lurI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfNt6MsLj0E&list=PLbzoR-pLrL... 68% of Linux kernel exploits in 2018 were caused by C's lack of features to handle memory corruption.
JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
I think the amount of people damaged by hacks exceeds the numbers saved in your scenario by several orders of magnitude. In fact your post is one of the first I’ve ever read that sees software and hardware vulnerabilities as a good thing.
- tinco 7y ago
  I'm not saying they are a good thing per se, just a reassuring thing. It means we still need to be in control of our systems, and can't blindly let our systems control us, because indeed they are fallible. It's of course rather philosophical. There's also a big difference between these sort of vulnerabilities, and the sort of problems that enable for example ransomware, which is a serious issue that has a more difficult solution than simply designing more robust hardware. Anyway, if you're intrigued maybe check out Ghost in the Shell sometime (not the one with Scarlett Johansson, although it is enjoyable, it's not really the same thing), if it needs to be Hollywood, then maybe the Hackers movie would also work a bit (with Angelina Jolie).
- Spooky23 7y ago
  There is definitely an argument to be made. Discovery of these bugs improves software. If not for Blaster/Welchia years ago, Microsoft would not have empathized security or quality in their products for years.
umvi 7y ago
> Then the 2010s happened and almost all software, even Windows, became near unassailable fortresses Maybe from remote attacks, but nothing can defend against a good ol' keylogger, not even 2FA.
- tinco 7y ago
  A proper 2FA implementation would surely defend against keyloggers? Unless your concern is leaking information?
ailideex 7y ago
> Back in the 90s and early 2000s we thought anything can be hacked by any clever person. We did?
- dylan604 7y ago
  I was thinking that might have been true back in the 80s. Hell, I still feel that way about anything analog. It's just nothing is really analog any more. Once things went digital and encryption was implemented, things just became more of a social engineering type of hack to get people to give you the information to walk in the front door. It's not that you hacked the Gibson or anything. Also, modern systems just don't have the cool 3D interfaces that all of the systems from the 80s/90s had ;-)
  - nesadi 7y ago
    It wasn't really until Windows 7 that Windows was to some degree secure as an internet-capable platform. XP was just terrible from a security standpoint until SP2 (2 years after launch), which at least added a decent firewall that was enabled by default.
- tinco 7y ago
  Yes.. Windows XP had an unending list of vulnerabilities, software patch policies were often horrible, hardware with outdated software was everywhere. Back then if you would call yourself a hacker or a hack group it would mean you had multiple 0day exploits under your sleeve for operating systems, browsers and web apps. Even if you were just a lowly scriptkiddie, because of the bad update policies you could just go to an exploit website, like metasploit is now, and try out the list of old exploits on any target you were interested in. A friend of mine had 40.000 routers in some Scandinavian country because their ISP shipped them to customers with a 4 year old BSD release that had known vulnerabilities in it.
  - ailideex 7y ago
    Maybe I am just pedantic but "many things" != "anything" and the existence of vulnerable systems does not invalidate the existence of secure systems.
jayd16 7y ago
>unassailable fortresses, especially systems like iOS It hasn't been particularly hard to jailbreak iOS or root Android devices if you have physical access. We've seen several hilarious examples of exploits over the years regarding lock screen bugs or magic SMS parsing bugs.
OrgNet 7y ago
> we all know that it's basically impossible to attack a modern well configured system. you must be living in a different world...
iamnotacrook 7y ago
"2010...Windows... became near unassailable fortresses" Did anyone read this and not laugh out loud? "These hardware bugs turn that idea on its head, suddenly the whole ghost in the shell hacker style dream is again a possibility" No, it was always a possibility.
- imglorp 7y ago
  Something interesting did happen around that time. Looking at all CVEs as an aggregate, it appears 2008ish is about when there was an inflection, perhaps a shift from OS to injection/validation/appsec? https://nvd.nist.gov/general/visualizations/vulnerability-visualizations/cwe-over-time https://nvd.nist.gov/general/visualizations/vulnerability-vi...
- novaleaf 7y ago
  I left msft in 2007 and at that time they were in full "security is important" mode. Due to backcompat it's of course hard (impossible?) to remove local exploits, but RCE is a lot harder. For example I don't know the last time I heard about a windows RCE. Edge/IE sure, but not windows. Windows Defender is a very good security product, and Windows Update "just works".

by tinco 7y ago

d2mw 7y ago

> we all know that it's basically impossible to attack a modern well configured system Where in the world did this fantastic idea come from? https://events.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Syzbot-and-the-Tale-of-Thousand-Kernel-Bugs-Dmitry-Vyukov-Google.pdf https://events.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/1... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwn2Own#Summary_of_successful_exploits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwn2Own#Summary_of_successful_... https://threatpost.com/baseband-zero-day-exposes-millions-of-mobile-phones-to-attack/124833/ https://threatpost.com/baseband-zero-day-exposes-millions-of...

tinco 7y ago
How many of those kernel bugs translate to meaningful RCE's in generally available stable software? Maybe I'm out of the loop, but as that presentation says nowadays a big 0day will have a logo and national headlines, that also underlines how rare they are. To me the history of Pwn2Own exactly shows the trend I'm talking about. Going from very successful editions to increasingly less successful editions as the years go by to the point where the competition barely even exists anymore. And then that baseband firmware exploit, that's the dream. You could hack any device with that almost regardless of what software runs on top. I put that in the same class as the Intel chip vulnerabilities.
- staticassertion 7y ago
  Well the first Chrome RCE attack leveraged a Windows kernel exploit, so that seems like a reasonable one to point to.
- d2mw 7y ago
  Pwn2Own fell out of the spotlight over time because they managed to piss off sponsors and teams alike, not because any material improvement occurred in software security, involving systems that for the most part continue to be millions of lines of C just like they were in the 90s. Security processes have improved tremendously in recent times, but software security in general has advanced only incrementally at best, such that individuals can still succeed at breaking the majority of software, and are able to do so with such reliability that the practice is done as a sporting event. Per the slides over 150 of those kernel bugs resulted in code execution, and that is already a lowball count of the true number. Upstream Linux, being possibly the most visible and well-resourced OS codebase around, even by 2019 does not have the tools necessary just to automatically find the bugs we already know exist.
  - BuildTheRobots 7y ago
    > Pwn2Own fell out of the spotlight over time because they managed to piss off sponsors and teams alike I don't suppose there's any more information - it sounds like an interesting tale.

userbinator 7y ago

Keep in mind that all these speculative execution exploits rely on being able to already execute code on the target, they can only read data somewhat slowly, and where the data you want to read is in a 64-bit address space is not easy to find. The media loves to blow things out of proportion, but all the specexec attacks are really not as big a deal as e.g. remote code execution. In some ways, they are the real-world equivalent of "you can sometimes hear things your neighbours say, with a sensitive microphone and lots of patience."

tedunangst 7y ago
How lucky then that we all live in the cloud now and running code on other people's computers is the only place anybody runs code anymore.
- tinco 7y ago
  In addition to that all sorts of vendors run their code on our systems to provide us with their features. And then there's the idea that some of these bugs have been demonstrated to be exploitable from within a JavaScript VM!
- menzoic 7y ago
  There's a lot more attention to this threat than there would be if the cloud wasn't ubiquitous. Could be a net positive.
cjbprime 7y ago
This is somewhere between misleading and wrong -- Spectre-ish attacks can be conducted by JavaScript when you visit a random web page. It's mostly appropriately-proportioned.
- inetknght 7y ago
  What is JavaScript except code being remotely executed?
  - 7y ago

badrabbit 7y ago

It's more like in the 90s and 2000s software-exploit based attacks were fairly easy. These days you have to adopt and use logical,social and configuration vulnerabilities that have always been common as well.

tinco 7y ago
Imagine the damage those ransomware people could have done back then.. Whole countries were open for disruption.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Given that Morris Worm is 30 years old and we keep using UNIX derived OSes, those ransomware people have plenty of opportunities still.
  - smhenderson 7y ago
    But surely there are a much smaller number of Unix computers running sendmail these days? And sendmail is a lot more secure now than it was 30 years ago. Doesn't seem like a fair comparison IMHO...
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Enjoy the Google talks from Linux Kernel Summit 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfNt6MsLj0E&list=PLbzoR-pLrL6rOT6m50HdJFYUHyvA9lurI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfNt6MsLj0E&list=PLbzoR-pLrL... 68% of Linux kernel exploits in 2018 were caused by C's lack of features to handle memory corruption.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

I think the amount of people damaged by hacks exceeds the numbers saved in your scenario by several orders of magnitude. In fact your post is one of the first I’ve ever read that sees software and hardware vulnerabilities as a good thing.

tinco 7y ago
I'm not saying they are a good thing per se, just a reassuring thing. It means we still need to be in control of our systems, and can't blindly let our systems control us, because indeed they are fallible. It's of course rather philosophical. There's also a big difference between these sort of vulnerabilities, and the sort of problems that enable for example ransomware, which is a serious issue that has a more difficult solution than simply designing more robust hardware. Anyway, if you're intrigued maybe check out Ghost in the Shell sometime (not the one with Scarlett Johansson, although it is enjoyable, it's not really the same thing), if it needs to be Hollywood, then maybe the Hackers movie would also work a bit (with Angelina Jolie).
Spooky23 7y ago
There is definitely an argument to be made. Discovery of these bugs improves software. If not for Blaster/Welchia years ago, Microsoft would not have empathized security or quality in their products for years.

umvi 7y ago

> Then the 2010s happened and almost all software, even Windows, became near unassailable fortresses Maybe from remote attacks, but nothing can defend against a good ol' keylogger, not even 2FA.

tinco 7y ago
A proper 2FA implementation would surely defend against keyloggers? Unless your concern is leaking information?

ailideex 7y ago

> Back in the 90s and early 2000s we thought anything can be hacked by any clever person. We did?

dylan604 7y ago
I was thinking that might have been true back in the 80s. Hell, I still feel that way about anything analog. It's just nothing is really analog any more. Once things went digital and encryption was implemented, things just became more of a social engineering type of hack to get people to give you the information to walk in the front door. It's not that you hacked the Gibson or anything. Also, modern systems just don't have the cool 3D interfaces that all of the systems from the 80s/90s had ;-)
- nesadi 7y ago
  It wasn't really until Windows 7 that Windows was to some degree secure as an internet-capable platform. XP was just terrible from a security standpoint until SP2 (2 years after launch), which at least added a decent firewall that was enabled by default.
tinco 7y ago
Yes.. Windows XP had an unending list of vulnerabilities, software patch policies were often horrible, hardware with outdated software was everywhere. Back then if you would call yourself a hacker or a hack group it would mean you had multiple 0day exploits under your sleeve for operating systems, browsers and web apps. Even if you were just a lowly scriptkiddie, because of the bad update policies you could just go to an exploit website, like metasploit is now, and try out the list of old exploits on any target you were interested in. A friend of mine had 40.000 routers in some Scandinavian country because their ISP shipped them to customers with a 4 year old BSD release that had known vulnerabilities in it.
- ailideex 7y ago
  Maybe I am just pedantic but "many things" != "anything" and the existence of vulnerable systems does not invalidate the existence of secure systems.

jayd16 7y ago

>unassailable fortresses, especially systems like iOS It hasn't been particularly hard to jailbreak iOS or root Android devices if you have physical access. We've seen several hilarious examples of exploits over the years regarding lock screen bugs or magic SMS parsing bugs.

OrgNet 7y ago

> we all know that it's basically impossible to attack a modern well configured system. you must be living in a different world...

iamnotacrook 7y ago

"2010...Windows... became near unassailable fortresses" Did anyone read this and not laugh out loud? "These hardware bugs turn that idea on its head, suddenly the whole ghost in the shell hacker style dream is again a possibility" No, it was always a possibility.

imglorp 7y ago
Something interesting did happen around that time. Looking at all CVEs as an aggregate, it appears 2008ish is about when there was an inflection, perhaps a shift from OS to injection/validation/appsec? https://nvd.nist.gov/general/visualizations/vulnerability-visualizations/cwe-over-time https://nvd.nist.gov/general/visualizations/vulnerability-vi...
novaleaf 7y ago
I left msft in 2007 and at that time they were in full "security is important" mode. Due to backcompat it's of course hard (impossible?) to remove local exploits, but RCE is a lot harder. For example I don't know the last time I heard about a windows RCE. Edge/IE sure, but not windows. Windows Defender is a very good security product, and Windows Update "just works".